Over the last few years many conservative politicians and media commentators have caused surprise amongst normal people by accusing various unlikely organisations of being part of an international left-wing conspiracy: the Bank of England, the BBC, the Stock Exchange, the Church of England, the Metropolitan Police, the Financial Times, the National Trust … the list goes on for pages, and only gets more bonkers as it does so.
One of the bodies which right-wingers get most upset about is the Royal National Lifeboat Institute. Now, it goes without saying that the very definition of a British Conservative is someone who doesn’t know any history – but is it possible that in this case, they everso slightly do? The RNLI was, after all, one of the great inspirations behind the founding of anarcho-communism.
When Manx soldier and philanthropist Sir William Hillary first came up with the idea for a “National Institution for the Preservation of Lives and Property from Shipwreck” he didn’t get very far. He sent a pamphlet setting out his plan to the Admiralty and various politicians and civil servants, but nobody in power seemed interested. Hillary must have been shocked by this, but he wasn’t discouraged.
At that time there were many hundreds of shipwrecks every year off UK coasts. Sir William’s original proposal was for the government to establish “a large body of men in constant readiness to risk their own lives for the preservation of those whom they have never known or seen, perhaps of another nation, merely because they are fellow creatures in extreme peril.”
Ignored by the state, he now went about setting up a voluntary organisation instead, self-organised and funded by donations. This approach was immediately successful, and on 4th March 1824, in the City of London Tavern in Bishopsgate, the National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck was formally launched. The king granted it the right to put the word Royal at the front of its name; it adopted its present title thirty years later.
Among the resolutions passed at that pub meeting were “That such immediate assistance be afforded to persons rescued as their necessities may require,” and “That the subjects of all nations be equally objects of the Institution, as well in war as in peace.”
Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (1842-1921) was born and died in Russia, but spent a good part of his adult life in exile in Britain. An accomplished geographer, his life’s work was to provide a scientific theoretical basis for what he called anarchist communism, using his studies in anthropology, evolution, biology and history. He argued that “mutual aid” – relations based on solidarity and cooperation – was not an idealist aim for the far future, but actually a crucial element in the development of civilisation; mutual aid had underpinned societies in the past, and continued to do so, he said, in the present. It wasn’t a utopian added extra – it was provably one of the eternal building blocks of human life.
Through most of human history, Kropotkin insisted, voluntary cooperation had been the main glue holding communities together – not the compulsion of law and the state. And this remained the case to a surprising extent: for instance, the ability to post a letter to another country or ride a train across Europe depended not on state structures but on what he called “free agreement,” on autonomous groups coming together to achieve mutual goals.
Even in a highly-centralised, capitalist state like Britain, he said, much of daily life was still governed by free agreement and mutual aid. As examples he mentioned the Red Cross, trade unions, scientific societies – and, above all, the Lifeboats.
Kropotkin, the father of modern anarchism, loved the RNLI and frequently cited it in his writings as one of the great contemporary models of mutual aid, self-government and free agreement. Lifeboats depended on localism and cooperation, and on an important principle: help is given freely, irrespective of whether the person you’re giving it to “deserves” it or not. That, obviously, is the only basis on which mutual aid can work – once you start deciding to help, say, only the unlucky rather than the reckless, or only the fisherman and not the smuggler, you’ve lost the universal nature of mutual aid and the whole thing starts to break down.
As Kropotkin put it, “those who man the lifeboat do not ask credentials from the crew of a sinking ship; they launch their boat, risk their lives in the raging waves, and sometimes perish, all to save men whom they do not even know. And what need to know them? ‘They are human beings, and they need our aid - that is enough, that establishes their right - To the rescue!’”
Whether the men and women who crew 21st century lifeboats consider themselves pioneers of anarcho-communism I have no idea. I do know that the RNLI reckons it’s saved 144,000 lives so far, that it is still independent of the state and dependent on volunteers, and that it is still financed by donations. Items left to it in wills over the years, says the institute, have included “a set of gold teeth, a pig farm and a 100-year-old bottle of cognac.”
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Sources:
https://rnli.org/about-us/our-history/timeline/1824-our-foundation
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/wayne-price-what-is-anarchist-communism
www.lboro.ac.uk/news-events/news/2020/march/anarchist-thinker-explains-coronavirus-helping/
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/conquest/ch3.html
A story of kindness (RNLI, 2024)
Wonderful!